School system makes good progress toward Pizitz Middle School relocation

The planned move of Pizitz Middle School to the old Berry High School campus is on schedule to happen this coming summer, with major work expected to be complete in early 2020, school officials said.

Vestavia Hills City Schools Superintendent Todd Freeman said in late October that the construction on the site, located on Columbiana Road, is making major progress and the original project and renovation is slated to be completed by the end of the calendar year.

Shortly after the beginning of the year, the baseball and softball fields will be completed, offering a chance for both the city and schools to use new athletic fields. Some small projects will be completed during the spring, with an anticipated move date sometime in the summer of 2020.

The ongoing work has included replacing the roof, building a new choir room, band room and gym and other interior work. Other internal work includes painting and flooring, and more carpool queuing space has been added at the recommendation of Jefferson County.

The Vestavia Hills Board of Education purchased the property from the Hoover Board of Education in 2016. The move from Pizitz, which will become a ninth-grade campus, to the Berry campus will increase the space for the middle school students by about 16,000 square feet, Freeman said. The campus has about 195,000 square feet. Columbiana Road will be widened in front of the school to accommodate the move.

Freeman said despite how complicated the project has been, the contractors have done a good job. Those contractors include Blalock Building Company, which is renovating and constructing the buildings, Norris Construction, which is working on Columbiana Road, and Duncan and Thompson, which is building the ball fields behind the school.

“This is an older campus,” Freeman said.

Some of the problems encountered were hard to diagnose because of the age. Due to an unexpected amount of rainfall in the winter of 2018 and early 2019, it wasn’t possible to move from Pizitz to Berry in the summer of 2019, as was originally planned, but a few months ago, Freeman announced the move would take place this coming summer.

The larger campus also allows the schools to plan for long-term growth. Pizitz currently has slightly more than 1,200 students, and the Berry facility will hold about 1,500 students, Freeman said.

The new campus also gives the schools two additional gyms, and more athletic space is always a premium, Freeman said. The system will keep the gyms at Pizitz as well.

The move also relieves pressure on the population of the high school, with freshmen attending the Pizitz campus instead of the high school campus, and capacity across the district is expected to be at about 70% for the 2020-21 school year, Freeman said.

The contract with Armstrong Moving Services is still in effect, Freeman said. That company, which handled the move this past summer in conjunction with the reconfiguration of elementary schools, also will handle the move from Pizitz to Berry.

At Pizitz, there will be some minor changes made to make it ready for ninth-grade students, but nothing major will need to be done at the campus, Freeman said.